Films Shouldn't Win Awards Unless They Pass the Bechdel Test
Nor should they get made.
I really do not “get” awards or award shows.
I cannot care about honors like the Academy Awards where 67% of the voters are men and 81% are white, and of the 13,445 nominees since 1929, 17% have been women and 83% men and less than 2% women of color.
But my bar is a lot lower than equality.
To qualify for a nomination, a film (or series) should have to pass the very simple Bechdel Test, where two women with names have one conversation about literally anything other than a man.
This counts:
Emma: “I’m sorry.”
Emily: “No, I’m sorry!”
Emma: “Don’t be sorry! I am the one who is sorry.”
Emily: “Oh, I’m sorry, you’re right. I’m sorry.”
Emma: “Please, the apology is all mine.”
Every idea should have to pass this very simple test to even proceed with the project: two women, one conversation, zero men.
Two women, one conversation, zero men.
Two men, one conversation, zero women happens so often there is no number for it.
What if—and I know this is asking too much—there were a test or a standard for every film and series where zero women:
are topless/naked
are fucked/experience instantaneous orgasm from furious penetration
are harassed/assaulted
are murdered/die
marry
Once you swallow the feminist red pill, you’ll notice that if a woman appears onscreen, likely she is or does three, four, or all of the above.
Why does this matter? Because I said so.
And because the price of most award-winners and award-eligibles failing the Bechdel Test includes (but is not at all limited to):
Being stuck with one central voice, one central POV, one central agenda. And the anointed who speak for women and about women and instead of women make me hate women/myself.
Amplified by the screen, the white dude’s voice and perspective and agenda have transcended it, manifesting in flesh and bone. Reality for women is a disturbing hall of mirrors where onscreen values are reflected in the orgasm/thigh/wage/leadership/gender-data gaps.
In a culture where men have a voice and women have a body, a lot of women don’t want to hear themselves talk or think.
We get stuck in this cycle: To tune out a world that doesn’t seem to give one shit about women—and to shut up our inner heckler that tells us we’re not worthy of one single shit—we consume whatever noise we can, and this noise only reinforces the paradigm that silences us in the first place. ARE YOU NOT EXHAUSTED?
Sexual assault. Every 68 seconds an American woman is sexually assaulted. “Rape is extremely rare in cultures that value women and feminine qualities,” writes prolific author and professor of communication studies Julia T. Wood. Cross-cultural research confirms that rape is most common in countries where modes of thinking, looking, and talking put women’s bodies at risk, “like the United States,” which has “ideologies of male supremacy and dominance and a disrespect of women.”
If women don’t have a voice of their own, that’s male supremacy; that’s disrespect. That’s not satire; that’s not a joke.
One study on entertainment that revels in female pain confirmed that after multiple viewings of slashers like Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—where female characters’ breasts and guts are exposed, their bodies invaded, defiled, and butchered as they’re stalked, abducted, terrorized, molested, mutilated, amputated, starved, sliced, eviscerated, and axed—viewers “ . . . including women,” were “more likely to believe that a woman who was raped wanted to be.” Have you ever rooted for a woman’s ravishment? #MeToo.
Canceling reproductive rights. Did you think Oppenheimer’s seven Academy Awards and abortion have nothing in common? HA. It’s all connected in this economy that says women’s voices don’t matter/are annoying.
Women not having a voice onscreen (or behind the scenes) and women not receiving life-saving health care and women not having a voice at work or in relationships or at a medical appointment—it’s the same silence.
Women will continue cycling; will continue to learn that speaking your mind makes you harder to hear and harder to help and harder to work with and harder to love and harder to bear; and will continue to hurt themselves—to self-objectify, to self-silence, to hate themselves, to disfigure themselves, to kill themselves—as long as white dudes continue making the same art and telling the same story by which we are socialized and through which we connect and see the world and ourselves.
Whatever else art is and whatever else fiction does—at this point, I don’t care. As a recovering straightwhitecisman-artist apologist, I no longer care how good the art is if mostly men make it and act as women’s voices and exploit naked women’s bodies instead of their own.
In my next newsletter I’ll answer the question of what to watch instead of must-see dead-girl TV.
In the meantime, check out Austin Public Library’s list of 72 films that pass the Bechdel Test.
ICYMI: I’m Elissa Bassist, and I teach short conceptual humor/satire writing, funny personal essays, tragicomic memoir, emotional emails, and that’s it. I edit the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus, and I wrote the award-deserving book Hysterical.
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This! Could not agree more. I don’t bother watching awards shows for this reason, and I don’t base my viewing choices on who wins what.
“I no longer care how good the art is if mostly men make it and act as women’s voices…”
YES!!! I say we throw all that shit into the grave with Philip Roth.